Douglas Murray

The papers today are full of the latest alleged ‘gaffe’ by Mitt Romney. It has become a staple of US election coverage that any Democrat’s foreign policy fumble is a ‘mis-speak’ while any Republican saying something even mildly contentious – as opposed to wrong – is a world-class clanger which shows them to be unfit for office. Today’s Romney ‘gaffe’ relates to his reported comments on the Middle East. This is not exactly a region in which the Obama administration has covered itself in glory.  But even as Obama’s policy failings are being felt, it is Romney who is being lambasted for, among other things, his claim that ‘the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.

These two stories are unlikely to make big news, but they should. Speaking in Amsterdam on Wednesday night, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Uri Rosenthal, urged fellow European Union members finally to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. Rosenthal said ‘The Netherlands has made another appeal to European Union members to place Hezbollah on the EU list of terrorist organizations.’ Commenting on Hezbollah’s involvement in the violence in Syria Rosenthal added, ‘You see what happens when this organization is allowed to operate freely.’ Then earlier today the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, announced that his country is to suspend diplomatic relations with Iran and expel Iranian diplomats from Canada.

So the Conservative party’s immigration minister, Damian Green MP, has introduced the idea of the ‘Danny Boyle test.’  In today’s Telegraph he argues that the Conservative party must resist ‘nostalgists promoting a better yesterday’ and that since the Olympics opening ceremony was a demonstration of ‘modern Britain’ it is therefore a ‘test’ that Conservatives must pass. And so the Labour MP Paul Flynn who described the opening ceremony of the Olympics as ‘a Trojan horse’  for the Conservative Party has been proved precisely right.

In the magazine this week I have a piece on learning poetry by heart. Spectator readers will remember that Michael Gove received some flak from teaching unions earlier this year when he suggested that British schoolchildren should be able to recite a poem by heart. In the piece I try to explain why this is a good idea, both as a mental discipline and a way of accessing the best thought and literature. I was never made to learn poetry by heart at school, but I have been trying to remember what the first poetry I taught myself by heart was. I think it may have been portions of Edward Fitzgerald’s version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Its metre and rhyme scheme, and the fact that the stanzas are short, make it ideal to memorise.

Julian Assange is one of my best enemies.  For my part it was hatred at first sight.  He was only slightly slower on the uptake.  Our relationship was consummated last year when we debated in London, and he fluttered those strange dead eyes at me, and threatened to sue me, and then didn’t, and I wrote about it afterwards and revealed to the world (or Spectator diary readers at least) that his backstage chat is like aural rohypnol. Anyhow – in recent months I have not had the time to keep my hatred active.  Partly because Julian has now even discredited himself with the left.

I do not necessarily wish to imply I have the gift of prophecy. But this is either uncanny or part of some cosmic plan to aggravate me. Three years ago on an edition of Question Time, alongside the then Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, the panel was asked whether we regretted bidding for the Olympics (since a recession had come along afterwards). I said that I had never been terribly in favour of getting the Olympics, not because of the expense or because our athletes wouldn't do our nation proud (as they more than have) but because of how bad we in Britain had become at selling ourselves as a culture. I referenced the beautiful closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics, which included a recording of Maria Callas, the finale of Mahler 3 and a reading from George Seferis.